Talk:Terminalia chebula

hello

configuration of terminalia chebula —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.185.1.4 (talk) 21:40, 23 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Black or Yellow

Was referred to as Black Myrobalan but both Monier-Williams Dictionary (sv. हरीतकी) and the Pali Text Society Dictionary (sv. harītaka) refer to this as the yellow myrobalan. These are not horticultural refs but they are usually quite reliable on these matters. Jayarava 12:59, 14 April 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mahaabaala (talk • contribs)

SAME PHOTOS

These two articles both have the same 3 photos under the Gallery section.(tree trunk, hanging fruit, and fallen fruit). Which one is correct?

Terminalia bellirica http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibhitaki

Terminalia chebula http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haritaki Truthseekermon (talk) 03:37, 29 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Names in various languages

Why have the names of Terminalia Chebula in various languages been deleted? In fact, that is the most useful part of the whole page. Most people I know who have looked up this page search online in their language and stumble upon this page. Nobody knows the scientific name. I too first came to the page by looking up Kadukkai. Please restore the section with the names in various languages. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.10.104.99 (talk) 02:37, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Well, WP:ISNOT notes that Wikipedia is neither a manual nor an indiscriminate list of information. We wouldn't normally list the names of a plant in all the other languages of the world in a large paragraph. "Nobody knows the scientific name": it is usually known as the yellow or chebulic myrobalan in English; what it's called in French, Greek or other languages isn't really important. There is a policy, WP:COMMONNAME, that outlines the guidelines for article names; specifically, Wikipedia:Naming conventions (flora) covers the topic of the article title: "Scientific names are to be used as article titles in all cases except when a plant has an agricultural, horticultural, economic or cultural use that makes it more prominent in some other field than in botany; e.g. rose, apple, watermelon. These exceptions are determined on a case-by-case basis through discussion towards consensus." If you want to make an argument that there is a common name (the daily use name instead of the Latin one), you can do so here.

As for inclusion of foreign languages: There are 20 official languages in India alone; lord knows this plant isn't limited to India. In fact, at the left side of the page are its links to the other Wikipedias, and as you can see, this article has parallels at many other Wikipedias, including the Hindustani language ones. If you are looking for a Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Chinese or Pashto plant, you only need to use the appropriate Wikipedia. There's a metadata system that links the articles. We definitely don't list, for example, the Urdu name unless it is also the common name in use in English, and it certainly isn't in this case. Ogress _smash! 03:12, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ogress, your arguments are not good because the medicinal USE of this tree is not common in the West but is common in India and Sri Lanka. Had it been popular in Greece, stating the Greek name would be important. The use of this tree is common in India and that is the most critical information. There are many pages on Wikipedia where the local names are given. Nobody has asked for listing names in every language in the world, only the languages relevant to the places where it is used. Trust me, Wikipedia does that sort of stuff elsewhere. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.10.104.99 (talk) 13:56, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Agree with Ogress: including these various other-language names is not encyclopedic. Alexbrn (talk) 14:21, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree. Those names in roman script for all sorts of crop plants are commonly used, and are not accessible through the inter-wiki. It is certainly a complication that there are many spellings and variants, but if a citation is given for each, then I'd heartily support including them. Common misspelling should also have redirects. Perhaps they could be separated onto pages such as "list of vernacular names for Terminalia chebula". Sminthopsis84 (talk) 16:54, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

172.10.104.99, your argument is that because it is popular in X countries, the name used in that country's non-English languages should be listed in the English wikipedia? Not unless English is an official language. If the Greeks loved T. chebula, we wouldn't necessarily list the name in Greek; That's what the interwiki bar is for. That's not an English wikipedia failing. India uses English as an official language, but you want to re-add non-English words. When I plug these words into Google translate, though, I get myrobalan as a translation! If they are demonstrably English common names, that is one thing, but if not, then at best they should be redirect pages.

Not true. My argument works because there is no common English name. I would have gladly deferred to the use of a common English name given that Wikipedia is primarily an English encyclopedia, but my objection is to the fact that the title and link both have scientific names not known to most people. In this particular case, the names in various languages transliterated into English are more commonly known than the scientific names. There is a commercial name in English that seems to have been derived from the Hindi name. I am on the fence on using this as the title and the link and would not protest as much although I think we need to think this through as well. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.5.184.237 (talk) 02:57, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sminthopsis84, those names are not present on wheat, rice, or maize; they are also not present on soy. Where exactly are you finding these lists of foreign words on well-patrolled and -written pages? (Maize has Spanish in the etymology.)

Wrong argument, the page on rice also does not have the scientific name as the link or title. It has a common name. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.5.184.237 (talk) 02:41, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to say that when it comes to, say, religious pages for Asia, which sprawls across dozens and dozens of languages, what we do when faced with a topic that has names in languages from Mongolian to Gujarati? We list the equivalent of the common name (usually Sanskrit or Pali for Indian religions) and when appropriate, we actually an infobox to list other languages. We don't have such infoboxes in WP Plants and I'm pretty sure there's no WP Ayurveda. Ogress _smash! 17:51, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

But those still have common names as titles and not the scientific name. We are grappling with a case where there is no common name in English. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.5.184.237 (talk) 02:44, 10 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No, my argument is that names used in supermarkets in English-speaking countries are legitimate topics for encyclopedic material. Maize, rice, and the small number of staple foods are not the problem. Fruits and vegetables are imported by merchants from the countries where those foods are regularly used. Names like "Nespil" and "Mamey" regularly appear in supermarkets in this multi-cultural western city. People here are learning those names because no English equivalents are offered in well-known sources such as wikipedia. It is easy to get the impression that the names in many different languages are actually different fruit. I also think that entering "Thai lime" in the search box should bring a reader to the taxon whose leaves are used in Thai cooking. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 19:11, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Those would still be common names, Sminthopsis84. That's not what we're discussing: we're discussing actual foreign material. Here's the paragraph that was removed:

In Hindi it is called Harad, Haritaki, or Harada, respectively 'Inknut'. In Urdu it is called 'Hareer'. In Sri Lanka it is called Aralu. In Marathi it is called as 'Hirada', in Kannada it is called 'Alalekaayi', in Tamil it is called 'Kadukkai' and in Malayalam it is known as 'Kadukka'. In Bengali it is called horitoky. In Assamese it is called silikha. In Telugu it is called 'Karakkaya'. In the United States it is found in some Indian stores; it is known as 'Harde Whole'.

By your argument, we'd add "harde whole", if that is actually an accurate piece of information. I find that when I google "harde whole" I get things like "Kadukkai is called "Haritaki" in Hindi and "Harde whole" in English. Kadukkai is an oblong shaped, brownish colored fruit." We wouldn't add 20 Indian languages, just the ones used in English. Listing Assamese, Bengali, Sinhalese, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada is overkill - and also leaves out all the names from the rest of the countries where it grows like Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, and East Asia (Thai, Khmer, Burmese, Vietnamese, Malay, Indonesia, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, Korean at minimum). Ogress _smash! 19:53, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ogress, it is clear you heard about this from Wikipedia or else you would not be making these arguments. Those who *know* about the tree and its use clearly are people more informed than you and they are the ones who want the more common names to be listed. They are the ones who should be contributing since contributing from a position of knowledge should be preferred to contributing from a position of ignorance. As for "Harde whole," it is true such a name exists and is a commercial name that is derived from the Hindi name. If you want to list it, I think it will be useful information but in the interest of accuracy, it may be better to state that it is a commercial name. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.10.104.99 (talk) 21:09, 7 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

English Wikipedia's readership is global. I think we absolutely should include Hindi, Tagalog and Malay names for useful plants found in India, the Philippines and Malaysia (these are the three biggest developing nations in terms of Wikipedia page views). There are plenty of bilingual people in these countries who communicate in English, while using the local name for edible and medicinal plants. When these plants show up in native English-speaking countries, they are often labelled with the local name. I can get frozen "methi" (slightly more familiar to me as "fenugreek") at a local store with the packaging entirely in English and I often buy interesting looking vegetables with names in Thai, or Vietnamese, and rely on Wikipedia to figure out what they are. The problem is obviously where to draw the line. Including Hindi shouldn't open the door for 20 other Indian languages.

Don't delete the names in this article in mass. Do some research. Check Google Books and Scholar; are there English sources using the local names? Here's one:

The plant mixture consisted of leaves of mango (Mangifera indica), jamun (Eugenia jambolana), guava (Psidium guajava), seed pulp of harad (Terminalia chebula) and fennel (Foeniculum vulgare)

That looks like English language usage of "harad" (and "jamun") to me.

For many important tropical plants, the only "English" common names will have been dreamed up by long-dead colonialists and completely forgotten by their grandchildren. Google tells me that the "inknut" which was in the article should really be "ink nut"; entirely English, but almost entirely unused. "Ink nut" gets 49 hits in Google Scholar (largely bogus stuff with ink and nut appearing in adjacent sentences). "Haritaki" get 1800 hits in Google Scholar (though many are for a preparation made from T. chebula and not the plant per se). Etymological origins shouldn't give "ink nut" a pass and exclude "haritaki". I'm not sure where to draw the line, but the best thing to do is put in some effort and check which names are used in English and try to get a handle on how widely they are used. Plantdrew (talk) 01:53, 8 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Plantdrew: You are missing the point. The deleted material is not common names, but rather a list of the name in a dozen languages. It's not foreign words used in English; it's the name in Assamese, Bengali, Sinhalese, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada. I'm fine with common names that are being used such as harda or harde, but I'm sorry, Assamese and Sinhalese are just not being used in many supermarkets. We want to run a discussion about names for T. chebula that are commonly used in English, we can do that, but this conversation is 100% not about that and the fact that people keep harping on how "foreign borrowings are good" is frustrating. I don't disagree. Ogress _smash! 05:07, 8 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

After doing some web searches for all the common names in the deleted paragraph, "harad" and "haritaki" strike me as crucial to mention, and I really think "hareer" belongs as well. Mentions of these names should of course have citations. The deleted section seems to have developed in fairly organic way in terms of how often a term appears. I have no objection to killing the later listed "harde whole", "silikha", "karakkaya" or "horitoky" which seem to be little used in English and often presented as synonyms of more widely used names (e.g. haritaki) when they appear in English sources. Plantdrew (talk) 05:42, 8 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I do not agree with this narrow-minded view of rejecting non-English names in an enterprise that declares its objective as making all knowledge of the world accessible to all people in all their languages. Apart from English, German and Spanish I happen to know 4 Indian languages and have friends among all these language speakers and many who speak other Indian languages. They would all welcome these Indian language names names appearing in the English Wikipedia to help them locate the appropriate article. So I feel that my additions should be allowed to stay in the article. Krushnarjun (talk) 16:46, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"Nut-like fruits"

Can someone clarify what the description "nut-like fruits" is meant to mean? In everyday experience, the fruits and nuts familiar to most people aren't similar to each other, and other sources compared the fruit of this tree to a plum, which isn't nut-like in any obvious way. RCTodd (talk) 17:33, 9 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]